When playing helps building resilience in Mali

When playing helps building
resilience in Mali

By Ilaria Firmian

I have just returned from the Mali
Enhancing Agricultural Productivity/Adaptation for Smallholder Agriculture (PAPAM/ASAP) project. It was officially launched last Thursday March 20th
in Bamako, in the presence of the Minister of Environment and the Minister of Livestock
and Fisheries.

There was a formal launch
following three days of intense technical workshop involving the newly
recruited project team that will be deployed in the Bamako, Sikasso and Kayes
regions; all key partners - Agence de l’Environnement et du Développement
Durable (AEDD), Mali Météo, Association des Agronomes et Vétérinaires Sans
Frontières (AVSF), Système d’Information Forestière (SIFOR) - and an IFAD
support team from West and Central Africa and Environment and Climate Divisions
were present.

Figure 1 - Mali PAPAM/ASAP Project - Ilaria Firmian

For the first time in an ASAP inception workshop, the Red
Cross Climate Centre facilitated the use of climate games. The games helped the
project team in understanding and taking ownership of the project’s goals and
objectives.

The game “paying for
predictions” was adapted to suit the Mali PAPAM/ASAP design concept. Each participant
represented a commune and sat with 5 others. Each table of 5 represented a region,
for a total of 5 regions. Participants had to cope with the cumulative effects
of the rains in the entire region (whose intensity from 1 to 6 was determined
by the roll of one green dice) and the local rain in each commune (determined
by the roll of a white dice). They were also offered the opportunity to protect
themselves both with disaster risk reduction actions such as tree planting, and
with access to climate information. Both these actions will be implemented in
the PAPAM/ASAP project.

Figure 2 - Mali PAPAM/ASAP Project - Ilaria Firmian

During the political segment,
the different introductory speeches, given from the perspective of Farmers’ Organizations
or of the Minister of Environment, have been focusing on the harshness of
climate impacts in Mali, that is suffering more and more from severe droughts coupled
with heavy rains.

IFAD representative's opening
speech illustrated the scaling up character of the ASAP project, which draws on
IFAD experiences in Mali with participatory approaches, such as participatory
mapping and vulnerability assessment,
for the development of local plans. Within ASAP these approaches will be
adopted at ecosystem level, to ensure that local development actions are
coherent and build an effective resilience.

Figure 3 - Mali PAPAM/ASAP Project - Ilaria Firmian

A simplified version of the
climate game played during the technical segment was adopted for the political
launch. Representatives from ministries, NGOs, CSOs and IFAD project
coordinators were put in the shoes of decision-makers having to take investment
decisions for a 10 year time period (“Decisions for the decade” game), and
consequently allocating their own budget (10 beans each) against three lines:
"regular" development, protection against drought, protection against
flood.

Although this was clearly a
simplified representation of the reality, participants tended to use their own
reality as a reference, for example, referring to the Malian average of a drought
every four years, investments were mostly going in that drought protection.
Many also commented that in the game it was impossible to avoid humanitarian
crisis and there was a great debate around getting the sense of how much it is
possible to escape crisis in reality.

The project team also
suggested that the game’s application in the actual project work with local
communities could be explored.

The climate games will soon be used in
other countries during ASAP inception workshops as a serious but fun way to
think concretely about the meaning of resilience